It has been over one year now since my wife Janice and I moved into our new house so we have had a lot of work to do. Most of what we have been working towards recently is to become more self-sufficient. We have a solar power supply with a generator back up and no connection to the grid. We have mutton, beef and pork running around to give us our own supply of meat.
This year Janice and I have been working on the gardens, both flowers and vegetables. We have learnt a lot from reading the Garden magazines and one of the big things that it has taught us is the importance of the humble honey bee. 1/3 of our food has been produced thanks to the honey bee.
As luck would have it Janice was working with a chap, Richard who was getting into bee hives so I talked to him about getting a hive. My timing could not have been better as Richard was just about to receive six new hives so was looking for somewhere to put them. So we now have two hives down near the orchard block. There are many different types of trees from nut trees to fruit trees so I would like to think that we will get a better result from them this year now that we have the bees to help pollinate them. When we brought this block of land eight years ago the people before us had been keen on planting lots of fruit trees and I can still remember those first couple of years when I would push through the scrub and find yet another tree that I had not seen before.
I even found another tree this year that I had not seen in the past. When we took the property over every tree had a label on it with its name. For the first couple of years I did not want to put any sheep around them for the fear that they would eat and kill the trees. They had been planted in amongst the matagouri and mingimingi so were hard to find some of them. Since then I have cleared out a lot of the scrub and fenced every tree that needed it. For the first couple of years I even pushed a lawn mower around to keep the grass down. I went through three lawn mowers as the scrub can be hard on them. With clearing out the scrub I have managed to save most of the pittosporums. I found that if a pittosporum is young I could leave a matagouri bush growing around it so that the sheep could not eat them and once they are higher than a sheep can reach then I can remove the matagouri.